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For now, I wanted to be here. I wasn’t ready to leave without the option of returning. I knew my resolve wouldn’t last forever. I wasn’t even sure what I was waiting to feel when someone finally found me. If, I reminded myself. If someone found me. All I knew was that I wanted to be found.
It was four, maybe five days after the Forest Service employee left that I heard the sound of the police cruiser’s motor in the distance.
As it came to a stop in front of the shoe and the raven’s stash, I braced myself for a cursory check.
The officer, a woman with a tight, graying brunette bun at the nape of her neck, pulled on gloves and grabbed a clear bag from the front seat of the car as she matter-of-factly opened the door and walked toward the shoulder of the road, scanning until she spotted the bleached-out shoe.
I watched her face closely. She hunched to get a better look and then carefully bagged the shoe before standing up and looking around her. Some of the leaves had already begun to turn brown and gold. The scarce vehicle traffic that ventured this far into the hills had all but disappeared, and in the mornings the edges of the scrubby brush and grass were tinged with a bite of frost. Summer was over. Soon fall would follow, and everything at this altitude would be covered by a blanket of snow.
The woman—whose name was Officer Domanska from her badge—placed the bagged shoe in the cruiser and made a note on her phone. Then she reached into the car’s dash and extracted what appeared to be the report the Forest Service had filed.
Brenda Maxwell, 28. Reported a shoe and what looked like old blood at 38°01'18.5"N 105°41'18.5”W near Ophir Canyon, on the shoulder of the road. Says she thinks something might have happened here. Four-wheel-drive needed, big ruts this far out.
I thought of the girl with the messy blond bun and silently thanked her. I hoped that whatever she’d been crying about wasn’t making her cry anymore. That she was smiling. I felt something like relief well up in me. If I could, I would have been crying.
Detective Domanska read the report then scanned the shoulder of the road and farther ahead, where it continued toward Ophir Canyon.
“It’s the other way,” I told her. “Please don’t drive away.” I moved until I was close enough to hug her. I reached for her hand, and I felt a little spark as she reflexively moved the hand to place it on the gun in her holster. Encouraged, I reached up to put my hand on her shoulder. “Please look around. It’s not dangerous. Not anymore.”
Keeping her hand on the gun, Detective Domanska took a few steps away from me in the direction of Ophir Canyon. The spark of hope faded to dull disappointment as I watched her walk farther down the road, scanning the brush and the rocky shoulder, using a long branch to prod into deeper thickets of sagebrush so she could see better.
My numbness gave way to despair as she reached the bend in the road, stopped, then strode back to the car. If she couldn’t find me, who would? I remembered episodes of Cold Case I had watched where bodies were unearthed years or decades later. By accident. By sheer coincidence. Or sometimes never. That was going to be me, I told myself. I wasn’t going to be found.
I let the hurt and the sadness wash over me. If she left with the shoe, would they test it? Did she know my name? Was my disappearance even on her radar? It’s not like I was a minor child. How much did anyone care, aside from my parents and friends, that I hadn’t come home. Was Detective Domanska thinking about me now and wondering whether this shoe might be mine? Would this be some kind of macabre Cinderella story? Or was I just a name among so many other names of people who never came home? For all I knew she was a junior detective who had been given the unsavory assignment of driving all the way out here to retrieve a shoe.
The despair coalesced into something sharp and black as Detective Domanska sat down in her cruiser and retrieved the keys from her pocket.
I glanced inside the cruiser at my shoe for a few seconds, feeling the sting of loss that it was leaving. It had become my Wilson. It had kept me company here as a castaway for God-knew how long. I was surprised about how upset I felt to see it go.
The only thing left here with me was my bones.
As Detective Domanska put her keys into the ignition and shut the door, I headed toward the hidden fork in the dirt road.
I would say goodbye to my bones. To the last thing that tied me to this place. To this life.
And then I would find Grandma Rosie and the others.
The despair softened into something tender and deep. I heard the cruiser start up behind me.
I studied the skinny, clumped trees reaching toward the cloud-filled sky overhead. They weren’t particularly beautiful. The elevation wasn’t high enough for the kind of dense forest I remembered camping in when I was younger. Still, they were the last trees I’d see on this side of consciousness. I tried to take in everything I passed for the last time. The sunlight filtering across the branches I couldn’t feel but would miss anyway. The hazy blue peaks in the distance that I knew were the Rockies. The sound of the slight breeze in the aspen leaves.
The muffled crunch of footfalls on the carpet of dry pine needles behind me.
I froze and turned around.
To my disbelief, I saw Detective Domanska at the fork in the road. She peered through the weedy brush that nearly obscured the dirt road from view. Then she stood scanning the path of the overgrown road until she was looking directly at me.
If she kept walking, she’d run right into my body. Or what was left of it. I hadn’t been to visit my remains in weeks.
I raced ahead, wanting to see what she would see. As I approached the place where it happened, the place where the blue Kia had pulled away while I ran toward the ravine, I panicked. The rusty blood that had been visible while the animals picked apart my bones was gone. And the bones that had once prominently lay on the surface of the rocky ground were covered with a thin layer of pine needles. Weeds were growing in and among my scattered, dirty remains. A section of my ribcage jutted up through the pine needles, and the dull gray of my skull appeared as an unusually smooth rock, an island in the pine needles and debris.
Unless she knew what she was looking for, it was highly unlikely that the officer would see me.
I braced myself for her to turn around again. To get back in the cruiser and report that she had retrieved the shoe. Instead, she moved toward me, closer and closer, peering into the sagebrush and at one point kneeling beside a larger pine to probe at a thin stand of mushrooms growing in the shade.
“Are you here, Meghan?” she said so quietly I might have imagined it.
Even so, the equivalent of a bucket of ice water crashed over me. She wasn’t looking at me. Or my body. In fact, she was looking in the opposite direction, toward the ravine that led down to the dry creek bed.
